In an electrophoretic display, charged particles in a display medium move in response to an applied electric field. This movement produces display states that vary with the location of the particles in the medium.
In a conventional electrophoretic color display, an image element that can produce different colors typically includes pixels that individually provide different colors. For example, there can be a red-producing pixel, a green-producing pixel and a blue-producing pixel, all included in a single image element to enable the image element to produce a range of colors. Similarly, a grey-level display typically would include multiple pixels, each with two optical states, such as black and white, to enable an image element to produce a range of grey-levels.
Each image pixel in an image element is individually addressed. The provision of address lines that address individual pixels at predetermined locations in a display can be quite complex and expensive. In color or grey-level displays, the necessity to address several pixels of different colors or grey-levels to enable a variable color or grey-level image element increases the complexity and expense of manufacture of such displays.